Control of Cavities with High Beam Loading

Beam loading of RF cavities is a subject of great concern for the design and operation of high current circular accelerators and storage rings. The steady state and transient perturbations of the accelerating voltage by the beam current lead to undesirable beam behaviour, like for instance the onset of instabilities or particle loss by lack of longitudinal acceptance. To some extent, it is possible to alleviate or even completely suppress these effects by a proper control of the RF power amplifier - cavity combination, using feedback or feedforward techniques. Several new developments in this field have taken place during the past years. For instance, the implementation of fast feedback technology, the use of cavity compensation schemes or digital filtering of signals in long delay feedback systems have resulted in considerably improved machine performance. Such techniiques will be reviewed in this paper and their performance and limitations will be presented.